


It Must Be Love

by HicSuntDracones



Series: My Heart is Filled With You [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: "Growth", "You know what that is?", Allison Hargreeves Deserves Nice Things, Allison's in a healthy relationship for the first time in her life, Because Allison deserves nice people, Because Allison's in love, Because I made this up, Black Male Character, Character Growth, Character Study, Character(s) of Color, F/M, Falling In Love, Female Character of Color, Fluff, Kinda, Not Season/Series 02 Compliant, Raymond is a nice guy, Sappy, Social Commentary, Social Justice, and we respect it, no beta we die like ben, reflective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:33:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25629028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HicSuntDracones/pseuds/HicSuntDracones
Summary: "He didn’t say that it would all be alright, didn’t try to shield her from what was hurting, didn’t assume she could handle it through virtue of being Allison. He was just...there. Being kind with no strings attached. It was weird. Good weird.There’d never been a lot of good weird in her life."Allison reflects on what love is to her, and how meeting Raymond changed what it meant. So this is Love, huh?
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Raymond, Raymond Chestnut/Allison Hargreeves
Series: My Heart is Filled With You [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857802
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	It Must Be Love

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be disproven immediately by the events of the show, but I wanted to write it because Allison has a very complicated relationship with love and what it means to her. Many or even most of her relationships were based on her wants and needs and the manipulation of others, which is so not healthy; by the end of season one though it is shown that she's making an effort to improve herself and her relationships. So I thought she deserves some nice things, like Raymond adoring the everloving shit out of her because she is awesome.
> 
> And the title(as well as that of the series, because I intend to write a similar piece about Vanya and her ladyfriend) is from 'You Got Me' by Colbie Callait, which is a song I am always soft for and can really be applied to any ship.

So this is love, she thinks, sitting in a police station. She’s not the darkest one in here, but she’s close. There’s over a dozen of them, activists and protesters and their families, all waiting to see their arrested loved ones. She has bail money in her purse. It should be enough, if she goes by last time. Still, she clutches the bag tightly.

Raymond’s in there. This time. He’s been arrested more than her, by simple virtue of being alive and fighting in this decade longer than she has, but it’s getting close to even. Allison had grown up in a time period where she was able to speak up, where she was allowed to be loud. Even in the months when she was waiting for her throat to heal, that instinct had never gone away. She is loud, and she is brave, and she has something to fight for, so she is going to fight with everything she has. Raymond loves that about her.

She fiddles with her ring, avoiding the eyes of the officers behind the desk. Even in her own time, when she was Allison Hargreeves, she had never liked police officers. Maybe it was a childhood of being told they were ineffectual, that a team of child superheroes was better equipped to right the wrongs in this world. Maybe it was just the way their eyes lingered on her a little longer than everyone else (except maybe Diego). 

The ache in her chest she gets when thinking about her siblings is almost unnoticeable by this point. It’s been, what? Three years? Three years since waking up almost forty years before she’s even supposed to be born. The first few weeks had been a waiting game, searching for any sign of her siblings and awaiting some kind of message. Nothing had turned up, and three months in she made the decision to stop looking. This was her life now, and she had to get used to it. 

Of course, that had been when she met Raymond. She’d been staying in a women’s shelter at the time, which was necessary due to the fact that she didn’t technically exist at this time and therefore had no ID, no home, no family, and no money. (She had very briefly entertained the idea of tracking down her birth family, but quickly deserted this idea based on the facts that she had no leads, no money to pursue leads if she had them, and didn’t even know if her birth mother was alive yet, much less how to explain to a family the story of her birth). Vanessa at the shelter-a sweet middle-aged lady who had taken Allison under her wing the minute she’d shown up with a giant bandage across her throat-had put her in touch with a group who could get her some ID and a chance to get back on her feet. 

The office in the back of a community center had been cramped and stuffy, and Raymond had been no-nonsense. Using paper and pencil, she’d quickly given him the backstory that Vanessa had unwittingly helped her create-separated from her family at a young age and later briefly married, she’d been on her way to a meeting with her estranged sister when she and her daughter had been caught up in a riot. Both her sister and daughter had died, and she did not want to continue under her ‘real’ name for fear of being arrested. It was a good, plausible cover story. Allison had volunteered few details about her life, but Vanessa had made assumptions and filled in the gaps. No ID? Lost or destroyed during the riot. No birth certificate? She didn’t know where her birth family was, much less if they still had a copy. ‘ _ Sister….attack _ ’, the only two things she’d written about Vanya? They’d been caught up in something larger than them and both suffered. 

It was a good story. She’d practiced ‘telling’ it, writing it down and emphasizing points with facial expressions or gestures. What she hadn’t expected was to start crying when Raymond asked what her daughter’s name had been. It had hit her then.  _ Claire _ . Her baby girl didn’t even exist yet, and wouldn’t for so many years, if she could even exist at this point, with Allison existing in places she shouldn’t be. She might as well be dead. Allison had broken down right there, staring at her daughter’s name on a yellow legal pad. Ugly, silent crying for everything in her life that was messed up and broken and missing. It was a very long time before she managed to breathe again. And Raymond was still there. He didn’t try to placate her, didn’t try to offer condolences, didn’t ask any more questions. He just held out a box of tissues. 

“It’s hard.”

Allison just nods. 

“We’ve all been there. It doesn’t get easier, I won’t lie. But eventually you’ll feel a little less like shit. Now, let’s get you some papers.” He didn’t say that it would all be alright, didn’t try to shield her from what was hurting, didn’t assume she could handle it through virtue of being  _ Allison _ . He was just...there. Being kind with no strings attached. It was weird. Good weird. 

There’d never been a lot of good weird in her life.

An officer comes into the main room from the holding cells, speaking quietly to the man at the front desk. After a moment the second makes his voice heard around the room, “All those here to make bail payments may now do so, please line up in an orderly fashion-”

Allison is already there, gripping her purse tightly. “Raymond Coleman,” she says quickly, daring to look the officer in the eyes.

“Relation?”

“I’m his wife.” She quickly displays her ring, then pulls out various certificates from her purse. No such thing as being over prepared when dealing with police. They’ll take any excuse they can get to deny her help. As the officer looks over her papers and fills out a form, she keeps her eyes focused on her ring. So this is love, she thinks again.

Every relationship before this one had been complicated, largely undefinable. First there had been...Luther. She could admit that to herself now, that her first real relationship or attraction to anyone had been to the boy she called her brother, which was fucked up on so many levels, but really, it was just the cherry on top of a severely fucked up childhood. The thing between them had always been unnamed at best, because if they thought about it too long they couldn’t stand to look at each other. Besides, Luther had adored her to the point of obsession. He was the only person she’d never rumored. She’d never needed to.

When she’d moved out, she’d jumped headfirst into the dating scene of Hollywood. Eighteen year old Allison had wanted nothing more than to be like the glamorous models on magazine covers, a new gorgeous and famous boyfriend every other week. She’d managed to do exactly that. With the help of some rumoring of course. Again, in hindsight, severely fucked up. None of them could really be called boyfriends, not when they barely knew what they were doing.

Then there’d been Patrick. From the start, some part of her knew it was doomed to failure, if only because she’d chosen him. An up and coming young actor with an interest in charity and little to no knowledge of the Umbrella Academy. He was smart and kind and great looking, not a playboy or asshole, and sweet to her whenever they ran into each other around town. Really, the ideal relationship. And all it took to get started was one little rumor. 

_ “I heard a rumor you asked me out for coffee.” _

Then, it was the little nudges, here and there. “ _ I heard a rumor you forgot your ex-girlfriend’s phone number”, “I heard a rumor you wanted me to meet your parents” , “I heard a rumor you asked me to move in with you” _ . It seemed like she’d cracked the relationship code. She had her boyfriend,  _ the Boyfriend. _ They were a power couple. And it wasn’t like he didn’t like her. Maybe he even loved her. Really, she was doing what they both wanted, right? She hadn’t rumored him into proposing, after all.

And then, suddenly, they were married. Yet in her mind he was still, Patrick, her boyfriend. An excellent boyfriend, but she really should have stronger feelings about the man she’d sworn to live the rest of her life with. She rumored him less, then not at all. But no grand feelings grew between them. He suggested couples therapy, because he remembered things being so much better when they were dating. Allison gently steered him away from the idea. At the time, she’d justified this by saying that if she’d made it this far in her life without therapy, she did not need to start now. Later, she realized that she just didn’t want to get called out on her bullshit or actually share her feelings with her husband. Which should have been a massive red flag. But the issue was ignored, and then Claire came about. 

Claire almost destroyed the carefully constructed glass house of Allison’s life. This was because holding her baby daughter was the first time she’d ever felt real unconditional love for someone. Which was terrifying, but galvanizing. She would make this family work. So she went back to the careful rumoring, the whispers that made everyone happier, more amenable, the perfect family.

But real families loved each other, didn’t they? The perfect mom didn’t wonder if her husband and daughter would hate her for what she did to them if she ever let them find out. She loved Claire, and maybe even Patrick, but did they love her back?

Raymond had come to her first, which in itself was a huge change from any other relationship. She’d always been the seeker, the chaser, the huntress. She knew what she wanted and went after it. It turned out that Raymond was the same way.

He’d walked into the salon she’d gotten a job at(years of doing her own hair and make-up on set had prepared her well for faking a cosmetology license) and...didn’t want anything. She’d held up one of the little cards she carried around while her throat was still recovering- ‘hello. What do you want?’-and he just said he wanted to check up on her, make sure she was doing okay.

He piqued her interest, okay? He was sweet. He cared. He didn’t come on strong, but she figured out after the fifth time he asked whether she had problems eating, what with her throat and all, that he wanted to take her to dinner. (Later, he’d laugh at her for taking that long to realize, and she’d swat at him playfully). So they went. And she enjoyed it. A lot. Not being able to talk made her feel like the Little Mermaid, but even with the little she was able to write, Raymond thought she was hilarious. And he told her so. Often. It was adorable. 

They created a routine; twice a week he’d pick her up from work and they’d go to dinner. Tuesdays they would go dancing and Friday’s they’d go walking and she usually stopped by his office at some point with cookies the ladies at the salon had foisted on her ‘for the young man so smitten with you’. It would have been embarrassing how obvious his devotion was if she wasn’t-for the first time in her life-smitten as well. It was just so easy to let herself be loved by this man and love him back. It was...simple.

If their relationship was simple, the world surrounding them was anything but. For Raymond especially, who was involved in the paperwork of half a dozen protest groups and handled case’s like Allison’s on a daily basis. Not everything he did was strictly legal, and the stuff that was definitely went against the status quo. It was dangerous.

But Allison hadn’t been a superhero for nothing. From the minute Raymond started opening up about his work, she made it very clear she wanted to help. She’d grown up knowing far more freedom under the law than he had, than anyone in this decade had, and if she was going to do anything with her strange life, it was going to be making sure that the kids of the future-all the little Allisons, all the little Claires-got to be free as well.

(A few months after they started dating, she was finally able to take the bandages off her throat. Raymond was there, trying to be sweet and romantic by kissing the scar on her throat, which, she’s not gonna lie, was very nice. She may have ruined the moment by whispering, “If I can shout now, does this mean you won’t freak out if I come to the protest?” He’d laughed and kissed her and then the rest of the night had been spent preparing for said protest, which had gotten them both arrested. 

This became a pattern. They were gentle with each other and fierce in the name of others and perpetually spending large portions of their income on bail money. They’d gotten married very quickly after a fire scare at the community center where Raymond had his office-officially it was an accident, someone left a vacuum plugged in too long-but it was too close to a lot of important documents and her Raymond for Allison not to be suspicious. 

Having rings didn’t change things too much. They’d already been living together. The most striking thing for Allison was that she thought of Raymond as her husband. There were no last-second trip ups where she almost called him a boyfriend, he was her husband. He was going to stick around. She was going to stick around. It was strange and terrifying and wonderful, and Allison had decided she was never going to let him go. How obviously she was in love would have been embarrassing if Raymond didn’t take every opportunity available to remind her how much he adored her. So this was love.

  
  


The officer finally finished filling out the forms, giving her dirty looks the whole time. “The bail comes to sixty-five dollars, which must be paid in full to release-” She interrupts him by sliding the money across the counter. He raises an eyebrow, counts it, holds it up to the light. Sniffs at it, then at her, before ushering her back to where the cells are, shoving a bag of Raymond’s confiscated belongings at her. 

“Raymond Coleman!” He shouts, and Raymond stands from where he’d been sitting on a bench.

“Hey, honey.” He says to Allison, grabbing her hand through the bars and kissing her knuckles. It’s reassuring to both of them.  _ Hey, you’re still alive, nobody hurt you, we get to go home now and start this all over again _ .

So this is love, she thinks. Something you’re willing to fight for. She smiles at him. “Let’s go home.” There’s a lot more fighting to be done, and they’ll do it together.

**Author's Note:**

> Is this coherent? Who knows.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @hairasuntouchedaspartoftheamazon
> 
> Watch me go start season two this instant


End file.
